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It was the voice talking.
The creature.
Skarde stopped, the blood spilling from his lips and he looked above him at the creature, going against every instinct.
The creature was smiling. If it could be called a smile. If that really was a mouth and not a hole to some Hellish eternity.
Skarde looked back down at the woman.
She was gone.
There was no woman at all.
Instead it was a tail.
Leathery and dark and hard. Rough pebbled skin that had a small tear in it where blood flowed freely.
The creature had tricked Skarde.
There was no woman at all.
There was only this beast.
He had bit through its skin.
He had drunk its blood.
Now it is complete, the voice said. You will take your place here, you will have your eternal life. You will live with the darkness that you are and you will cheat death because you are death. Because death is all you’ll bring this world and the next and the next. You need to never fear death again.
Skarde didn’t even have the time to feel disgusted because his body immediately started to change. It felt like his bones were breaking, his organs shifting, like his heart stopping pumping and the air left his lungs. His teeth fell out, rattling across the stone floor, and fresh, sharp canines painfully pushed through his gums.
“What am I!?” Skarde screamed in horror, voice echoing in the room as his body transformed and contorted and became something inhuman.
The creature chuckled.
You are my son now, Skarde. And you will become hell on earth.
1
Lenore
Present Day
“Excuse me, miss. Are you okay?”
Sure. I’ve just forgotten how to breathe, that’s all.
I lift my head and look over my shoulder to see a man in a heavy coat and unkept beard, a face marked by an unkind life. He’s staring at me in concern, which I’m not taking too lightly. For this stranger to be concerned about me means that I must look really rough.
I give him a quick smile, even though I’m shaking on the outside, screaming on the inside. “I’m okay. Thank you.”
Lies. All lies.
He watches me for a moment, still staying in the shadows of the alley. I don’t know how I ended up so close to the Tenderloin district, I guess I wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking. The moment I left the house, I was in a dream state, not caring where I was going, as long as I got to the water. For some reason I thought seeing San Francisco Bay would put my heart at ease and clear my mind and remind me that I’m still the Lenore Warwick I’ve known my whole life. That I’m still me, no matter what I am now, no matter what I’ve done.
But my walk has brought me closer to areas in the city most people know to avoid, especially at night, and now I’m in the grips of a full-blown panic attack, frozen on the spot, leaning against a dirty building and trying to breathe. It doesn’t matter that I could technically go without air for an inhuman amount of time, thanks to my vampire blood. It doesn’t matter that I’m sure there’s some kind of spell that would ward off such attacks, thanks to my witch blood.
Nope, all that matters is that right now it feels like I’m going to die. All rational thought has left my head, all I feel is fear, that choking, pressing horror that I’ll never take a deep breath again, that my heart is going to punch right through my skin, that I’m going to collapse to the needle-strewn ground. I don’t care that some homeless guy is watching me have a freak-out right here on the street.
Okay, I care a little bit. It’s enough to distract my brain, to make me focus on him instead. Not that I’m scared of him, per se, but I am a twenty-one-year-old girl in the wrong neighborhood, conversing with a transient, and I’m clearly not at my best.
I try to straighten up and push myself off the wall, feeling immense vertigo as I do so. I want to bring out my phone, jam my thumb on the digital button on the panic attack app I have and have it talk me through this, remind me that it’s all in my head, but I don’t feel like flashing an iPhone around.
“You sure you’re okay?” the man says, shuffling forward.
I nod quickly, pressing my lips together. I feel like I’ve troubled him and I need to make it okay. I reach into my crossbody purse and quickly rifle along the bottom, collecting the loose coins and some bills. I’m not sure how much I have but I take a step toward the man and hold out my hand.
“Here, maybe you could use this,” I say.
The man looks surprised and holds out his palms and I drop the money in it, mostly quarters and a five-dollar bill.
